Idols and Twisted Gnostic Secrets

[aggienaut]

   Most recent LJ Idol poll is up. With 28 people remaining, its easy to read them all. I encourage doing so. And voting! (=

[Poll #1348977]

   I stared deep into the dark coils of lj, to understand its arcane inner magic, and lo, I was rewarded with gnostic secrets. Anyone can post any poll. I'm not a hacker, there is no secret. I simply questioned what I couldn't do and was rewarded.
   And I found this pleasing -- that specifically the kind of behaviour I thought most commendable (questioning your surroundings) yielded a reward of some usefulness. Personally I think the advantage gained by being able to post the poll in your entry was more deserved to those who found it and more proportional to the merits of earning it than nearly all the random "rewards" and "Special powers" that have been purposefully bandied about in this competition. In short, it made me feel like at least something was right in the world.
   However, all good things must come to an end. All too often good technology is eventually twisted, and this has happened.
   Gary became concerned and asked how it is done, and the knowledge was passed on to him. I hoped he would have the good sense to keep it under wraps, or at least would tell everyone about it all at once. Unfortunately however, he simply told two idolists, spydielives and kittenboo.
   It is no longer a slight advantage to those who have thought to question and investigate their surroundings on their own, it is now an advantage to those who asked Gary how to get advantages. That literally makes me feel sick, and I'll feel filthy until I rectify it.
   From here I'm quite clear that it will continue to spread, and until someone posts about it publicly the people who have gained the knowledge by asking others will do it under the table. Already today I'm seeing strange vote spikes NOT accompanied by a visible entry, that ARE accompanied by "last post: four hours ago," a spot I can't see an entry anywhere near.

   And so, I am levelling the playing field. I am telling each and every one of you that yes, you can post the poll. The method is shockingly, mind-blowingly simple, all you have to do is try. That or ask Gary.


PS: I thought I'd brighten your days with a visual representation of the poll standings. Please stand by, hopefully I'll have some charts converted to a postable size and form within an hour or two.

Comments

Re: This is the most grammatically correct argument I've ever seen on the internet.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Ahahahaha that would be such a funny banner to use if one was bitter. But I'm not bitter (yet? ;D jk) and I don't think his highness the administrater would appreciate it.

But yeah definitely not worth getting a headache over.

And in re "the proper light" I found in my last post people were really tryyyying to find conspiracies. For example several people argued with me over that the reason people go down the last day is people at the bottom desperately grab for votes. They were all like "that MIGHT be true but also people can take away votes." Yeah I'm sure maybe there's a small amount of that heppening, but its been clearly shown that asking your f-list for votes gets you votes, and we know a LOT of people do that on the last day, so it follllowss..... but no they don't want to have it. They want to think people are out to get them.
   Or several people mentioned how frontrunner RM "would have won last year but was taken out in a conspiracy in a contestant only vote." But then she didn't manage to post the link to her friends list this vote until several hours in and was in LAST place until then ... so I think its pretty clear it doesn't take a conspiracy to kill her, she just has very very little support from contestants and can't hack it in a contestant only vote. But noo they want their conspiracy.

Re: This is the most grammatically correct argument I've ever seen on the internet.

[rapidrabbit.livejournal.com]

I'll be sure to throw a banner together for you should you become bitter. :-P

I don't think it's any surprise that the internet is beloved by conspiracy theorists. Perhaps they're not into the staged moon landing or grassy knoll theories, but dammit, they'll find it somewhere.

Not to sound callous, but I'll be quite fascinated to see how this all affects your score this round. Because it seems like its own double-edged sword - you're probably getting plenty of attention right now, but you could definitely be rubbing plenty of people the wrong way. Methinks you'd be in the most danger if there's a contestant-only vote coming up, and this has ruffled enough internal feathers.

But hey, if you get kicked in a future contestant-only vote, you can always say it's a conspiracy.

Re: This is the most grammatically correct argument I've ever seen on the internet.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Haha in fact if I get kicked in a future contestant only vote now I have a specific reason to say the conspiracy is out to get me!

But yeah I hypothesize this will mostly hurt me. "Getting attention" may be a good thing when you're lost in a crowd of 125, but with 28 of us left I'm guessing everyone is already more or less aware of everyone. There will definitely be people miffed about this though. In particular I think I enraged someone who is well networked with other people involved, spends a lot of time in the Green Room (where I rarely venture), etc.

How far in did you drop out?

Re: This is the most grammatically correct argument I've ever seen on the internet.

[rapidrabbit.livejournal.com]

I think you're probably right about how this will affect you. You should have started all your l33t hax0r poll-posting months ago, when the drama would have helped! People probably would have forgotten they were mad at you by now. :-P

I think I made it through Topic 4, then took a bye on Topic 5 because I went on vacation. Then during vacation I hurt myself and spent the next ten days on Percocet, utterly unable to speak or type a coherant sentance without giggling like a drunkard. Needless to say, I withdrew during Topic 6 in an attempt to maintain my dignity. :-P

Re: This is the most grammatically correct argument I've ever seen on the internet.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Aw thats a shame. Gonna dive in next year?

Re: This is the most grammatically correct argument I've ever seen on the internet.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

but speaking of l33t hax0ring skillz I can't help but mention again how absolutely hysterical I find it that there literally is no secret. The same tag that goes in your entry when you post your own poll can be used for someone else's poll (with the correct poll number subbed in). I thought I spelled that out pretty clearly in this entry, at least clearly enough that you'd think people would try it (I'd still rather they "discover" it themselves even if I've all but given them a manual) but people were still making comments to this post about how they knew I was using some kind of source code. I don't even know what that means!

Re: This is the most grammatically correct argument I've ever seen on the internet.

[rapidrabbit.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it isn't a complicated system. (Really, I think anybody with even the most basic HTML ability would be able to do it...and that's about the level you need in order to properly execute an LJ-cut, so hopefully most folks on here would be capable if they tried.) Most of LJ's coding is pretty simple that way. I guess people don't like to experiment.

And regarding the above comment, I probably won't go for next year, just because it turned out to be more overwhelming than I expected. I didn't really involve myself in the Green Rooms (I tried, but it just didn't interest me), but in the beginning, the pure volume of entries was completely overwhelming for me. (I'm in grad school for English right now, so you can imagine how much reading I already do.) And I feel like an ass if I don't read any, or only read a few, but the fact of the matter is, the list of entries has only recently shrunk to what I find to be a doable level. (Honestly, I feel like the field could be slimmed down faster in the beginning - more eliminations - to reach doability faster, but that didn't seem to be the case. It was only 1 from each tribe, then somewhere it turned into only a couple over all each week, then it jumped back to six a week, and the whole thing gave me a headache. It would make more sense in my mind to keep it a solid percentage, something like the bottom 10%, but then I'm sure people would bitch that they just didn't have a chance to prove how awesome they were because too many were cut too fast. There is no winning.)

Also, while I find drama entertaining to watch, I've been involved in enough to last me a lifetime, and thus I avoid it like the plague. It seems hard to avoid in LJI, which makes me wary. I'm sure I'd find some way to piss people off (however accidentally) and stir up a shitstorm. Then I'd have to start calling people hax0rs, and it would just get ugly....

Re: This is the most grammatically correct argument I've ever seen on the internet.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah I definitely agree with the overwhelmingness in teh beginning. Concentrating only on one's own tribe certainly helps, but even then, each tribe was pretty big. I'm thinking so I don't go insane next year I'm just going to say that I'm only going to keep track of and read some 30 people's entries, and if I finsih all those and have time / am bored, maybe I'll read others, and I'll read the people who are in last place each poll-closing-day.

And yeah I REALLY don't understand why now that its a handle-able number of people we're eliminating 15-20% each round, while we went at 5% when we had ridiculous amounts of people in.

Re: This is the most grammatically correct argument I've ever seen on the internet.

[thenodrin.livejournal.com]

"Honestly, I feel like the field could be slimmed down faster in the beginning - more eliminations - to reach doability faster, but that didn't seem to be the case. It was only 1 from each tribe, then somewhere it turned into only a couple over all each week, then it jumped back to six a week, and the whole thing gave me a headache. It would make more sense in my mind to keep it a solid percentage, something like the bottom 10%, but then I'm sure people would bitch that they just didn't have a chance to prove how awesome they were because too many were cut too fast. There is no winning."

To be fair, when we began we were losing 1 from each Tribe (5) and about 5 per week dropping out or not submitting an entry. So, we lost 5% per week for quite a while.

It was a nice inverted bell curve for a while. We lost a lot at start. Then, as the field narrowed and fewer people dropped out every week, and there were fewer Tribes, we lost only a few. Then, the Month of Doom hit and we lost a high percentage again.

Theno

Re: This is the most grammatically correct argument I've ever seen on the internet.

[supremegoddess1.livejournal.com]

Source code would be another way to do it. From a page, go to View: Page Source (in Firefox, anyway, but IE probably isn't too dissimilar). That will show you the HTML code for the entire page your viewing. The difficulty is figuring out *which* parts of the source code are relevant to the poll and which are not, which I am not geeky enough to do. I was able to figure out most of it, but the poll formatting came out wonky with some unclosed tags in it when I tried. It was still "voteable," it just looked funny.